Before Seatbelts and Sunscreen

My mother drank Livingston’s screw top wine
in the summer of ’71.
At the bar she was called, “Sweet Caroline,”
Around our campfire she sang Glen Campbell songs.

In the summer of ’71,
we never wore shoes, or combed our hair.
Around our campfire she sang Glen Campbell songs,
sometimes we’d dance outside the bar’s back door,

We never wore shoes, or combed our hair.
In the morning, she’d drink coffee through a straw.
Sometimes we’d dance outside the bar’s back door;
Dad was on another tour in Vietnam.

In the morning she’d drink coffee through a straw;
her hands shook so hard I’d hold the mug.
Dad was on another tour in Vietnam,
but he was there the day medics strapped her up.

Her hands shook hard so I’d hold the mug.
I knew she was sick, but she was always close by.
Dad was there the day medics strapped her up.
Though we never wore shoes or combed our hair.

I knew she was sick, but she was always close by.
She quit drinking and spent most her time with new friends,
Though we never wore shoes or combed our hair.
Strangers told us our own stories through a new lens,

She quit drinking and spent most her time with new friends,
I can still see her cocked smile over the glass.
Strangers told us our own stories through a new lens,
I can hear on the juke her man Johnny Cash.
I can still see her cocked smile over the glass.
She drank Dr. Livingston’s screw top wine.
I can hear on the juke her man Johnny Cash.
At the bar she was called “Sweet Caroline.”

Romantic Suicide

Like her coffee cup forgotten
on the roof of the car,
this monument the moon—
full and pretty, but
does it mean anything besides
a bowl of light in the dark?

Thinning every night
as if to contract from wonder.
What’s the point of it
to us anyway? As if
obsucurity raised hope.
As if the moon too
gratefully acknowledged
what remained of the object world—

The Drive to Descanso

Staring out at the road going backwards,
from the third seat of a Chevy station wagon,
there are things about youth that only youth knows:
the cracking of ice, underground passageways, fires lit
in a ring around the lake, the sound of a door slamming.

Barefooted you wander off, you were six
with your hair cut in a pixie.
Father was gone.
This hunger, dark and nocturnal,
strong enough not to wish
you were there. Brother and sisters,
like wildflowers assembled
in a museum of stones.

Mother was drunk. She’d dance
and chant snow across the mountain
until ash from dead fires ringed
her. A part of you brighter
and silent, floats among the flakes.
But what you recall most
is the danger of sunrise,
its pink lantern scorching the trees.

Song

Night tucks sadness in,
one cricket creases silence,
folds tears into song.

To a Sunflower on her Birthday (For Fastie Murphry)

I miss the loose-stemmed wild flowers;
heads bobbing and bowing in the breeze.
Here in the tropics,
heavy stemmed faces sharp as scythes
stare out of the green.
I miss the humility of a thousand twin faces
coloring a hillside—I miss
the anonymity of blending
I’m tired of being seen,
of knowing the loneliness
of a flimsy imposter
except for these moments
when the sunflower in you
meets my gaze
with seeds spilling between us.

Get High by C. Baudelaire

You must always be high. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get high.
And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of the ditch, in your room's gloomy solitutde, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, "It is time to get high! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue as you wish."

Feared Drunk

The following poem won second place in The League for Innovations Literary Contest and appeared in the publication, Confluence.

Suddenly nobody knows where you are,
your body thin as mother’s milk,
your mind tipping like a teacup
on the flesh of a split lip.
Your body is never left alone,
a daughter or your husband sit
like sparrows sipping from an
abandoned spring.

You see things only you alone
can see; Yogi the Bear, The
Virgin Mary and a family
of literate mice.

Lucid dreams leave
your family waiting outside
the picture frame:

You paint Mary leaning
against a pine tree,
Yogi is drinking coffee on
a street corner and
the mouse delivers a note.

Then, from the bed, your gaze turns
from a pearl into a bullet.
You know exactly where you are.

Coming closer, you see the family
resembles a hungry pack
of winter worn wolves.

But there’s no den to retreat into
and no drugs to soften the return.

Once you survive
an addiction,
it becomes the duck
that ate the bread
that does not lead back home,
but rather
to a hot and yawning oven.